Election "Known Unknowns"

The 2024 election is unprecedented in many ways, making it harder to predict outcomes. But we can try to understand how much we don't know.

At a 2002 news briefing, George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, jabbered his way through a matrix of possible realities around weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that were supposedly possessed by Iraq.

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.

— Donald Rumsfeld, February 12, 2002

While some accused him of using this apparent word salad to obfuscate the increasing suspicion that Iraq did not, in fact, possess the WMDs that Bush and Cheney told us about, buried within the clunky verbiage of the “Rumsfeld matrix” was a set of tools for analyzing situ…